Happy World Penguin Day !!

On this, the most joyous of all secular holidays,

we join the planet in celebrating  World Penguin Day,

with a series of funposts

         HERE.

The singing, dancing throng

Footnote:
By coincidence, today Antarctica celebrates World Featherless Biped Day (that’s us).  Coincidence, because the celebration does not always fall on April 25;  as you might expect, penguins follow a lunar calendar.  In this they resemble the ancient Hebrews, of whom some reckon them to be a Lost Tribe.

Kafka on Identity Theory

The (dis)solution of the Jewish Question:

Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam?   Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam.

-- Franz Kafka, Tagebücher:  Aufzeichnungen aus dem Jahre 1914

(“What have I in common with the Jews?  I have scarcely anything in common with myself!”)

Subsequent fictional embodiment:  "Schakale und Araber" (1917);  anent which, canny observations here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackals_and_Arabs

Further epigrams on the subject of 

        similarity/sameness/equality/self-identity

        “Same Difference”

Double-edged Meanings

(Significations à deux tranchants.)

We earlier examined the case of politically sensitive non-verbal interpretation:

“La quenelle”

And subsequently, in the same context of Judeo-Gallic sensitivities, a verbal case:

“La fournée”

And now, as an update to that latter essay, this:

The Jewish community was shocked by photographs taken at a Berlin demonstration last week where the clothes of children were brushed with red paint. To some, such images allude to the death of Palestinian children in the Israeli strikes on Gaza. But Jewish leaders here have condemned them as a revival of anti-Semitic myths that paint Jews as child killers who used their victims’ blood in religious rituals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-spills-into-europe-with-protests-anti-jewish-slogans/2014/07/30/36ca8d41-b5a4-4790-9b53-c94e75da4ba6_story.html

I have no idea whether attribution to Germans generally, of a memory of the blood-libel, is realistic or not.   This knowledge lives on, to be sure, among Jews and folklorists -- it was strictly in an academic context, while studying literature from the age of Chaucer, that I learned of the thing.   Certainly your average American, whose collective memory extends back no further than Season 1 of “Mad Men”, would not have a clue what you are talking about.   But there are, indeed, parts of the world, in which the Unfinished Business of History looms large in preconsciousness -- particularly, among Muslims of the Middle East.  (For an excellent discussion, cf. Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam [1988].)

For another case of interpreting a non-verbal symbol in the Middle East, try this:

The Rabi`ah

Phrase for the Sabbath: Shabbos Goy (updated)

The original sabbath is Saturday, a connection reflected in cognate terms for the latter such as Spanish sábado, Arabic sabt, and more obscurely in French samedi (from Late Latin sambati dies), German Samstag.   For observant Jews, the day comes with many practical restrictions on what you are allowed to do -- no turning on lights, operating machinery, etc.

To observe the letter of the Law while yet enjoying the usual convenience, some Jews traditionally made use of a Shabbos goy -- or, more genteelly, Sabbath gentile -- to perform the necessary actions.

As, in the Depression-era memory of a working-class Gentile growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan:

There was also some Jewish fellows who I made a few dollars from.  I’d be standin’ around on one of the holidays  and the Jewish man would say, “Come up and light my fire.  I’ll give you a nickel.”  So, great, I’d go up the stairs, but I never could understand the whole concept of the Jewish holidays  where somebody would stand right next to you and you would light it for them, but who was gonna question them? I nickel here and a dime there -- that was big money.

-- Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This:  An Oral History of Manhattan  from the 1890s to World War II (1989), p. 575

Yet a more particular conscience might be troubled at this dodge, and indeed we read:

If a non-Jew lights a lamp on Sabbath, a Jew may make use of the light.  But if he lights it for the sake of the Jew, it is forbidden.

-- The Mishnah: Oral Teachings of Judaism, transl. & ed. by Eugene Lipman (1970)

With a curious combination of ostensible observance and covert opportunism, a loophole was found even for this.   A footnote explains:

Non-Jews have also been used to keep coal furnaces going on Sabbath  and to perform similar minor chores -- all in violation of the Sabbath.  A legal fiction is used by the rabbinate to justify this practice.  The Jew may not ask the non-Jew to perform the service, nor may he compensate the non-Jew for performing such services.  The non-Jew “volunteers for his own reasons”, and the Jew benefits.  Later, a gift of gratitude is given to the non-Jew for the coincidental fact that his “volunteer” service was of benefit to the Jew on Sabbath.

One is reminded of those Islamic banks which obey the letter of the ban on usury by not charging “interest” on loans, so named;  but charging … ahem … certain fees …

Jesus, as was his wont, swept aside the casuistry, and cut right to the root: 

“The Sabbath was made for Man,

 not Man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

[Folkloristic note:]  Notions related to the "Shabbos goy":  cat's-paw;  proxy.

~

~   ~

A bonus, of Jewish interest:

Why you should never let a gentile run a pawnshop:

Murphy Makes a Mitzvah

[Kindle] [Nook]

~   ~

~

In European history we find a sort of mirror-image or dual of the shabbos goy:  the Hofjuden.

The wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had played into the hands of the Jewish money-changers and moneylenders, who had made themselves indispensable to the absolutistic princes.  Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the rules of states and principalities were depending  in their financial enterprises  on their “court Jews” (Hofjuden) … In the age of Metternich, most of the Jewish court bankers were baronized, although they were still deprived of citizenship.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 554

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Ich bin der Graf von Metternich, and I approved this message.)

~        

Another little-known parallel between European and MidEast social history, this from 19^th-century Prussia:

Jews and members  of the armed forces  were excluded from citizenship,  the former for racial,  the latter for professional reasons.  Members of both categories were considered as “denizens” (Schutzverwandte).  They were forbidden to own real estate, were excluded from trade and industry, and had no share in city administration.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961), p. 434

This arrangement of Schutzverwandte is reminiscent of the institution of dhimmis -- certain non-Muslim groups tolerated (and surtaxed) under caliphal rule.  (The “dh” here represents a voiced interdental fricative, like the initial sound of English this.)

The English Wikipedia entry, by the way, paints a happy-face on the history of dhimmi disabilities.

The German version, by contrast, names names:

Der Erlass des Abbasidenkalifen al-Mutawakkil gegen die Dhimmis

• Gemäß dem Historiker at-Tabarī erließ der Abbasidenkalif al-Mutawakkilim April 850 einen Befehl, wonach Christen und alle Schutzbefohlenen honigfarbene Umhänge taylasan und die althergebrachten Gürtel zunnar und eine gelbe Kopfbedeckung zu tragen hatten. Kleidervorschriften und weitere Unterscheidungsmerkmale sind allen Gemeinschaften des ahl al-dhimma auferlegt worden.
• al-Mutawakkil ließ ferner an die Häuser aller Nicht-Muslime schwarze Teufelsköpfe malen und ihre Gräber einebnen, um sie dadurch von den Gräbern der Muslime unterscheiden zu können.
• •            Gottesdienste und Beerdigungen sind unauffällig zu halten; dabei sind keine Zeichen ihres Glaubens, z. B. Kreuze, zu zeigen.Gemäß diesem Erlass von al-Mutawakkil mussten neu errichtete Gotteshäuser zerstört werden. Wenn der Platz groß genug war, sollte er als Bauland für eine Moschee verwendet werden.
• Dhimmis durften in Staatsämtern nicht beschäftigt werden.
• Kinder von Dhimmis hatten keinen Anspruch darauf, Schulen der Muslime zu besuchen oder von einem Muslim unterrichtet zu werden.

You will notice that the imposition of a yellow badge of shame upon the Jews, made notorious by the Nazis, was actually invented much earlier, under the Abbasids.

For a rich collection of cultural and semantic observations about the classical age of Arabic,

consult my book:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

[Update April 2014]

Jung had been, as is very clearly evident from Freud’s own emphatic statements, the Parade-Goy of the early psychoanalytic movement.

-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985; 2^nd edn. 1993), p. 8

(Here  Gellner is using the modifying appositive Parade-  in the German sense, as in Paradepferd;  nowadays Americans would say "poster-goy".)

The author adds in a footnote (p. 226):

This term, literally Display-Gentile, was in current use to describe a Gentile figurehead of a Jewish firm, set up to ward off anti-semitic feelings towards the establishment in question.

Compare, in our own day, the Parade-shvartser (among other ornaments) as a front for business benefitting from set-asides.

Update July 2018]  It turns out there is a curious reflex of goy in the French lexicon: goujat.

1. (vieux) valet d’armée
2. (vieux ou régional)  apprenti maçon

3. (vieux) rustre …

[mot languedocien, de l’ancien provençal gojat “gars”, hébreu goya “servante chrétienne”]

-- Dictionnaire de la langue française (Bordas)

Of Crime and Sin -- and Mercy

Here is how the Pope spent Maundy Thursday:

Le pape François a lavé jeudi les pieds de douze détenus, dont deux jeunes filles, dans une prison de Rome. Un geste sans précédent.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2013/03/28/01016-20130328ARTFIG00781-le-pape-francois-lave-les-pieds-de-prisonniers-en-italie.php?m_i=fSgfH0c9z5Z5iwNgDjybIwnS1%2BrMquj2avRmKRCWTccshP1L8

The press made a big deal out of how some of the prisoners whose feet the Holy Father washed, were women -- as though everyone involved were Salafi.

In the section of readers’ comments, Christians ‘got it’, whereas a couple of baffled agnostics worried whether, by this action the Pope were being “soft on crime”.  (The fingers twitch, itching to add an editorial “[sic!]”:  but in fact, on reflection, there is a kind of truth in this view.   But it is not a truth of the marketplace, nor indeed of this world.)

The foot-washing ceremony is not really doctrinal:  it is exemplary and physical.  When Jesus did it, it prefigured that final physical act of grace, the sharing of the bread and wine, commemorated in Communion.

Crime, like war and pestilence, and all the other woes of this vale, are concerning;  yet Christ and his church are after bigger game :  Sin.   This distinction is signally illustrated that supreme scene of all our literature, in which Jean Valjean, having been hosted to dinner by the Bishop, makes off with the silver tableware;  is caught, and hauled back to the Bishop’s dwelling in custody.  “Ah, so glad to see you again, my friend!” cries the Bishop, to the amazement of the constables.  “You forgot the candletsticks!”

Only in the shallowest view  was the Bishop being ‘soft on crime’:  He had spotted in Jean Valjean something much worse than any crime:  a soul in peril.   On the usurer’s balance-pan, the Bishop’s act makes no sense;  but it had a transcendent sense -- it gave sense to a life that erst had lacked it.

~

All this leads us to the mystery of Mercy -- and thence, to the Merchant of Venice.

Some choice passages of Theodore Reik would here be in point, but the volume lies not to hand.  The upshot, if memory serves, was that, although Shakespeare wore very lightly  whatever religion he may have had, he grew up in an England steeped with Christian legend if not theology, and may have been influenced by it here;  and that we are to take the play (whether Shakespeare himself so intended it or not) as a serious confrontation between Judaism and Christianity.   Our only point in raising this here, is to angle back in on the mystical import of the Pope’s gesture (so strange to the unchurched).   In light of this, we are not really practicing textual criticism here, so much as suggesting a possible staging of the play.
 

The Merchant is of course  a painful puzzle for the modern metteur en scène:  No one wishes to appear anti-Semitic.   Do you downplay Shylock’s Jewishness?  Do you insert apologetic mumblings into the program notes?

The reading (or staging) that I suggest, confronts this question in a way that has nothing whatever to do with political correctness:  that of not playing down, but playing up Shylock’s Jewish faith and ancestry, playing it up to its full and mighty stature, whose long shadow has ever lain across the world.

That Shylock could be a money-lender, followed from well-known sociohistorical reasons;  the status neither shocks a modern audience, inured as we are to the world of promiscuous high finance, nor has it any theological significance:  it simply is perfect for the plot.  That Jews in the Middle Ages were the ones who must finance the follies of the Gentiles, is historically amusing, but does not go to the heart of Moses, nor of Abraham.   The covenant of Abraham, and the laws brought down by Moses, are the rock upon which all that was later solid  rests.   Shylock, as such, should not be edulcorated, and he needs no excuses.   He is (or, let us depict him as) a pillar of Old Testament rectitude.   In insisting upon the force and vigor of his bond with Antonio (for the Jews well know about bonds, as well as bondage), he is as righteous in his way, as the cadi ordering the amputation of thieving hands.   Basanio -- the feckless debtor whose follies set the whole thing in motion -- is callow by comparison.  (Were I to stage the play, he would be played by one of the Monty Pythons.) 

Shylock movingly depicts  the plight and trials of his long-oppressed people;  but when it comes to the case in point, he needs no lawyer’s rhetoric or tricks:  he has the law on his side.    Portia herself admits the literal justice of Shylock’s claim, by all the judicial reasonings of this world.